More importantly, it will make them worthless. If everyone has a college degree, you'll need a masters or PhD for any sort of job in a profession. High school diplomas are more or less free, but are all but useless when it comes to obtaining employment. No employer is going to be impressed by a college degree if college is free.

If something becomes more available, the market will adjust to accomodate it. When financial aid, student loans and government grants became widely available, college tuitions went through the roof.

But those are wrong things being repealed, not new benefits being introduced. The complainant's position is largely that Warren's position is unnecessary, and that his anecdotal buddy family COULD have paid the tuition, but chose not to, and Warren would reward their improvident choices with money taxed from him.

Your examples would preclude ANY sort of reform. Decriminalize drugs? Not fair to people who've already been punished. Not fair to people who've had to make efforts on account of those laws, like police and corrections officers, who might have undertaken a vocation to help the public or rehabilitate violent offenders, and found themselve conscripted into an unwinnable war. Open the borders? Not fair to the people who took all the risks and undertook the danger of wetbacking it. Not fair to the people who got raped by coyotes or the children kidnapped to serve as human shields from the Border Patrol. End the war? Not fair to those casualties already harmed or killed (actually, this one has been used a lot).

Student loans are not a condition imposed by the government (except as a link the in chain reaction of programs by Warren's ideological forebears, like Claiborne Pell, who drove up tuition with his grants), they are agreements that people enter into freely and want to break once it's inconvenient. Yes, yes, they "have no choice" if they want to blah blah blah. The key word being there "want". They want something but don't want to do what's necessary to get it. They believe, with no pertinent factual knowledge of the process, that what they want costs "too much" and therefore, they are entitled to whatever shortcut or circumvention they can manage. They can take out a loan, get the benefits of the loan, and probably apply it unwisely, by spending four or more years partying and coming away with nothing to show for it but a degree in sociology, race/gender studies, communications or education. And then they have to compete in the job market with only that as an asset, and find out just how much they will have to do without to pay back the cost of that education, and their temper tantrums combine with the venality of politicians to make the amelioration of student debts something on the level of a moral crisis.

If people had to pay for their educations with the sweat of their own labors, they'd make better choices about their approach to that education and want to be sure they'd get something back for it. It would also mean that taxpayer money, through government grants and subsidies and underwritten student aid, would not subsidize so many useless colleges, departments and courses.